I had heard that in the ’70s and ’80s, mags like Savage Sword of Conan and Heavy Metal and Creepy were big favorites of people in prison. It’s like this weird blend of real history with fiction, and I like to have layers in our comics, so they reward going back and seeing connections you might have missed the first time.įor the two Criminal stories in Wrong Time, Wrong Place, it was partly a function of the time period they were set in. There’s a Donald Westlake book where one character reads a Parker novel (written by Westlake under his pseudonym “Richard Stark”) and decides to try to pull that heist, and I just loved that.
I always enjoy meta-fiction, and thinking about the kinds of movies or TV shows or comics that your characters might read. Is this a natural consequence of writing these stories as a comics fan? Do you think that, given this is the medium you’re working in, it’s a natural point of reference to use?Įd Brubaker: I think it’s probably some obsession I haven’t thought about the reasons for too hard. Hyperallergic: Comics show up as a motif throughout Criminal. I spoke to Brubaker over email about the book, Criminal as a whole, and the new Amazon miniseries Too Old to Die Young, which he wrote alongside Halley Gross and director Nicolas Winding Refn.
The book was of course timed to release right ahead of this year’s San Diego Comic-Con. Intermingling with this plot are numerous references to the history of comics and fandom, particularly how poorly comic book writers and artists have been treated by the companies they worked for.
The story follows a onetime comic book artist escorting his washed-up mentor through a comics convention, as it slowly unfolds that the old man has some less-than-legal adventures planned. A recent two-issue arc, Bad Weekend, has now been published as a standalone own graphic novel.
Each several-issue arc of the series is self-contained, telling a different crime story within the same shared world, with certain characters crossing over between them. Writer Ed Brubaker and artist Sean Phillips’s comic book series Criminalhas won scads of accolades since it started in 2006. It takes some of society's most taboo subjects like sexual assault, politics, and corruption and blends them together into a fast pace, bingeable docuseries.Bad Weekend (cover art by Sean Phillips, courtesy Image Comics) Discussing both the corruption within politics and sexual assault awareness, this series packs a punch with its storytelling. Dating back to 2011, the four episodes in this series explore every twist and turn during Strauss-Kahn's scandal, a story that had major ramifications and led to the birth of detrimental government conspiracies. Filmmaker Jalil Lespert sits down with the hotel housekeeper that was assaulted by Strauss-Kahn, Nafissatou Diallo, as she gives a harrowing recount of the traumatic incident. At one time in his career, one of the world's top 25 most powerful people, Strauss-Kahn's scandal is broken down by those who were directly involved. Room 2806 is the story of French politician and former director of the International Monetary Fund, Dominique Strauss-Kahn, and the sexual assault allegation that forced him into resignation.
This tragic story and subject matter are Netflix's bread and butter when it comes to true crime, and Popplewell delivers an enticing-although not so easily digestible at times-film that fits perfectly into the genre. With the alleged murderer analyzed right in front of us, audiences are still left questioning the culprit up until the film's final sequences. Filled with interrogation footage of the murder's prime suspect, Shanann's husband Chris, this film is a rollercoaster ride of the case's most shocking revelations. Examining archival footage from Shanann's Facebook and interviews with those that knew the family most, the film takes us through the disappearance of the three victims. The film investigates the murders of Shanann Watts, who was pregnant at the time of her death, and her two children, Bella and Celeste. A true family tragedy that the world watched unfold and, thanks to social media, filmmaker Jenny Popplewell reopened the case in 2020's American Murder: The Family Next Door.